PlanetWars 13 is now Live!

PlanetWars has begun and both factions are burning their way through the galaxy. In a mere two hours both factions have successfully captured their first planet.

If you are level 10 or above sign up to a faction, invade a planet and join the conquest. If you not level 10 then sign up anyway, play several more ordinary games and then invade planets.

Check out the main view to attack planets through the site, view the current state of the galaxy and see who has the initiative and for how long. Initiative and attacking have ZKL integration but be warned, a strange Nightwatch error can cause the times displayed in ZKL to be incorrect.

Make sure that at least one member of your faction has read the manual.

I should mention that there was a bit of a rules change9 hours ago. These are generally really bad to do and it was added due to some miscommunication but now that it is in it may as well stay there. Also without it the round probably would have been very short and it would take work to set it up again.

In effect a warp core attack requires 10 dropships to reach full effectiveness. If you warp attack with less than 10 dropships the total IP from the battle is reduced to 0.1*#Dropships. There are still some relatively minor problems with the way dropships work but those are definitely small enough to wait for the next round.

So, when a player plays a 2v2 game, he gains a +50 to his metal quota, together with his teammate, and those 100m are added to the team storage.

However, any person with enough quota can spend those resources. That means some high-ranking manager, or another player whose metal was spent earlier.

Dont you see a problem there? That since the officials are spending public metal this increases "debt" in the form of growing unspent quota for other players?

Imagine how hard its gonna be to save up for some large project - your faction saves up 8k metal, then some nabs whose metal was being spent by the Mastermind appear and spend it on some useless shit.

Why isnt personal and community metal (and maybe other "resources" like dropships and bombers) are just split and counted individually.Say, each player retains 50% of their metal, and the rest is taxed into the faction storage. They can donate it if they want, but want to keep it and build whatever they want on their polanet, if they get one.

Same with everything else. Right now it feels like the whole metagame is played by 2-3 people on each faction, and the rest of the faction are just there to provide force for battles. I dont think such approach is going to be very fun to anyone but those 2-3 people.

If nabs spend "their" metal in a crappy way then it's up to the rest of the people to try and communicate to convince them not to. This is similar to the main ZK metal. They can also only spend as much as they earned so as long as cooperative people play you'll eventually save up.

quote:If nabs spend "their" metal in a crappy way then it's up to the rest of the people to try and communicate to convince them not to. This is similar to the main ZK metal.

What happens right now is that the structures built by nabs just get reclaimed. That works as a forced donation of sorts. You cannot take away the metal from a nab, but you can reclaim things he builds, which achieves the same goal. And if he doesnt build anything, you just spend his metal directly.

Personally, i dont like that sort of centralisation, where some sort of commander is in full control of absolutely everything that belongs to the faction. When someone can control your shit, you stop caring about it as your personal property.And building up your personal planet, building and controlling fleets is a major and fun part of PW, which should be available to every active participant, not only to the chosen 3 people.

quote:Personally, i dont like that sort of centralisation, where some sort of commander is in full control of absolutely everything that belongs to the faction. When someone can control your shit, you stop caring about it as your personal property.And building up your personal planet, building and controlling fleets is a major and fun part of PW, which should be available to every active participant, not only to the chosen 3 people.

I think centralization is important to good coordination. Without it people would always ignore the plan and use the faction's resources doing something stupid. The effects of this would be even more pronounced with a turn system.

Currently Rising is organized so that nearly all of our active players are kept up to speed on current strategy and they can use our metal and ships. I don't know about SynHeg, but Rising has very few people who are merely footsoldiers.

So fleets are actually managed by just 2 people, and the entire faction is mostly run by a total of 3: Rafal, ArchShaman, TheSponge.On top of those 3, we have 4 more who have done more than 1 action.

quote:Rising has very few people who are merely footsoldiers.

Then what are the rest of the faction doing?

quote:Without it people would always ignore the plan and use the faction's resources doing something stupid.

Yeah, sucks that people cannot have fun because they waste their faction's resources. If only they could have resources only they can spend... some sort of private property. But who am i kidding, those 4 guys who rule the faction really need all the resources and they know best how to spend them, decentralization will only lead to chaos anyway, so why bother.

quote:No idea. A lot of people (you included) have the power to build things and control fleets but very few use it. Nobody has asked for a command position and been denied.

Are you seriously surprised that people dont care about managing shit that's not theirs?

Thats how communism works. People dont have any personal stake in PW-metagame, and neither they have any personal responsibilities there. Its only natural that most dont care about participating, especially since the system kinda works fine without their input anyway.

quote:I couldn't find myself among those and yet I do build stuff (on my own, I don't have 100% quota) and none have been reclaimed so far.

Yeah, i missed you for some reason. Edited my old post with exact counts of actions.

But to sum it up again here, only 9 people ever performed any actions in the PW metagame (building stuff or sending fleets), and out of these 9, the 3 most active players amount to 83% of the total number of actions.

I think this is due to the fact that most of the time there is only one correct choice of what to build (at least early game, before factions clash). This means the only real contribution you can do is simply be there to click the button before a turn passes, which can be done by 1 dude at a time (2-3 total, counting online times).

IIRC the old decentralized system led to lots of complaints about newbies who had no idea how to play the metagame building random things with their metal and sending dropships to random places*. Now that PW appears to be meant to be highly competitive anyway, there have been proposals to restrict faction joining to only selected individuals from the get-go (although this was more intended to deal with winning faction bandwagoning).

On the other end of the problem, even with a decentralized system people without any planets are still locked out from much of the game.

I previously created the PW ladder so people could still have fun Fighting and Slaying Their Enemies without having to worry about all the economy stuff. It might have worked better if I hadn't broken that round in other ways.(also I need to remove the mercs part)

*It's like every newbie rage ZK game except ten times worse because the negative impacts last for weeks or months instead of 30-60 minutes.

quote:the old decentralized system led to lots of complaints about newbies who had no idea how to play the metagame building random things with their metal and sending dropships to random places

Thats why you restrict access to the resources in faction storage to those who have the rights to use them.

But you dont just fucking remove personal property. What you do is tax all players by, say, 50% of their income. Half goes to the player's private storage, the rest goes to faction storage. Same with ships - if they are built on your planet then you get 50% of the produced ships, regardless of who built the factory.

For those poor people who have no planet, add an option to buy ships out of nowhere at high price. So investing into a factory is always a better option, but if you want ships to play with, you can get them even without owning a planet.

Add an option to donate resources to the faction storage. Limit the amount of space in players' personal storage so if they excess resources, they are automatically donated to faction. This will ensure the resources dont just stagnate inside somebodys storage if they dont care about PW and never spend them.

Now the nabs are limited to only wasting 50% of what they personally have earned, and the faction "leaders" basically get to play with 50% of entire faction's assets.

The only problem i see in such system is that nabs might start building energy-hungry structures on their planet, wasting everyone's energy. To counter that, logistics managers should have control over energy distribution, and if a planet cannot supports its structures, they should have an option to not feed that planet from the common energy pool. Said energy pool is generated by planets that are excessing energy and is spent either on supporting other planets, or on E to M conversion.